


Here Are Henry Mills' Mothers

by reagancrew



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/F, Family, Hurt/Comfort, Loss, Motherhood, Original Character Death(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-29
Updated: 2014-10-29
Packaged: 2018-02-23 01:57:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2529785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reagancrew/pseuds/reagancrew
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Here are Henry Mills’ mothers. They’re kissing. On a pirate ship.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Here Are Henry Mills' Mothers

**Author's Note:**

> There is a ten minute clip of Ragnar Kjartansson's 64 minute performance art piece "The Visitors" on Youtube. I listened to it on repeat while writing this.

_Here are Henry Mills’ mothers. They’re kissing. On a pirate ship. On their way to a fairytale world without parents, where children never grow up, never get old. Henry Mills is on that island. And Henry Mills is dead. But his mothers don’t know that._

* * *

Henry Mills is not born Henry Mills; he’s Baby Swan for the first two days of his life. And his mother’s name is Emma Swan. She is seventeen and tells the doctors, no, she doesn’t want to see the baby once it’s born. No, she doesn’t want to hold him. But she hears him cry out, loud and piercing, once she’s pushed and pushed and pushed him out of her. So she knows that he’s alive. He exists. She made him.

“I am not a mother,” she whispers two nights later, back in a cell, on a hard, cold bed that does not go up and down at the touch of a button. “I am not a mother. I am not a mother. I am no one’s mother.” Except she bites her knuckles hard enough to break the skin. She learned how to stifle her crying a long time ago.

* * *

“Hello,” she whispers. His dark eyelashes are soft against his cheeks. He has ten fingers and ten toes; she knows because she’s counted them. He is perfect. She is terrified.

If she watched sports, she might say he looks like a football, swaddled so snugly in the blue blanket she will never throw away. But she doesn’t watch football and the only thing she thinks of as this baby is handed off to her, is how terrifyingly heavy he is, how terrifyingly real he is, how terrifyingly happy she suddenly feels. `

Her name is Regina Mills. And she is Henry Daniel Mills’ mother, too.

* * *

 “I’m Henry. I’m your son!”

Emma Swan is afraid she might pass out on her kid. Her Kid.

Emma Swan is no one’s mother. This is no one.

* * *

 “You’re Henry’s birth mother?”

She could run away; hide; vehemently deny any biological relation to the angry ten year old disappearing inside a towering white house. But all she manages is an awkward half-wave (throwback to elementary school and being the new kid once again, twenty-four pairs of judgmental eyes staring at her tattered shoes and too big sweatshirt) and, “Hi,” she says sheepishly.

Here are Henry Mills’ mothers. They’re meeting for the first time.

* * *

 “ _You_ did this,” she is angry enough to kill. She has never been so completely out of control before. “Fix him,” she hisses.

“I _can’t!_ ” the woman she has pinned to the wall wails. She is breaking, broken, being held together by sheer force of will.

Here are Henry Mills’ mothers. They have been fighting and manipulating and threatening one another for months. Henry Mills is dying.

His mothers save his life, and manage not to kill one another in the process.

* * *

 Emma Swan pushes Regina Mills out of the way of a soul-sucking wraith without thinking. Because she’s the Savior. Or maybe because she cannot let Henry Mills’ mother die. Or maybe because she is acting on adrenaline and instinct and here is a person and there is a deadly creature and there are no choices to be made. Henry Mills is down one mother faster than Prince Charming can declare, “I will always find you,” to his dearly departed wife. But it’s not necessarily the mother anyone was expecting him to lose.

* * *

 “Stay away from me!” He cries, because he is ten and terrified, and Regina Mills tries her damndest not to break into a thousand pieces right in front of her son. There is no Emma Swan to force her to stay together now. To hold her against a wall and demand she paste herself back together with scotch tape and maybe a tiny bit of love.

Henry Mills is, quite suddenly, motherless.

* * *

 Love is not weakness, because the Dark One watches in fascinated astonishment as his old apprentice draws enough magic into her body to kill her five times over, and is still standing, albeit a bit drunkly, against a tree, when Emma Swan reaches five tired fingers over the lip of a well in the middle of a forest in the middle of nowhere, and rises from the dead of a Fairy Tale land.

There is a mouthed, “ _Thank you.”_ A returned, _“You’re welcome.”_ And perhaps, here are Henry Mills’ mothers. Hugging. Behind their son’s back as he leads them from the forest and back to Storybrooke, where chimera meat is only a distant memory, and lasagna has an added kick thanks to red pepper flakes. Hugging, like it’s muscle memory and not something they’ve never done before. Hugging and letting go as if burned, because that’s _their_ son, leading the way, and they were ready to kill each other a week ago, weren’t they?

* * *

 "I invited her!”

Henry Mills has two mothers. The sign reads, “WELCOME HOME MARY MARGARET (+emma).”

So, “Thank you."

"You said that already."

"For inviting me."

They don't hug again, because that was weird. But maybe they want to. 

* * *

 Here is Henry Mills laughing on a fire escape in New York, New York with his father, Neal, née Baelfire, son of the Dark One.

Emma Swan wraps her arms around her torso, and tries not to shatter.

She slips out into the hallway and hits the button for speed dial 3. And lets it ring and ring and ring. Because Regina Mills is with _her_ mother, and she once again wants to be a single parent, except now there’s a father and a mother and a mother. Emma Swan never asked for any of this and please Regina please please please answer the phone she begs silently. But no one does.

* * *

 Henry Mills woke up this morning with three parents: a mother asleep in the bed next to him, a father asleep in a bed & breakfast with a woman he does not realize has never loved him, and a mother asleep in the bed her son has not slept in for two years.

Except now he’s down a parent because of a pirate and a boy and a girl who work for people who hate what they’re afraid of.

Regina Mills is taunting Owen, a boy she tried too hard to love, back before she remembered just how to love again. She’s taunting him, because she buried his father out in the woods oh so long ago, and her whole body feels like it’s on fire, but her skin is ice cold. Is it selfish to want to die, even if it means leaving your son behind with two idiots for parents, even if it might mean being free? And wasn't that what she always wanted?

* * *

 For about five minutes, Henry Mills has three parents again, but he doesn’t even know it.

* * *

 “I love you.” She says it because it’s true. Because Neal didn’t hesitate to fight the woman who was his fiancé when he knew she was a threat to his son. Because Neal has known Henry Mills for all of a week, and he loves him. Because Neal is pretty much a good guy and he taught her what Tallahassee could maybe be someday. Because he’s about to die, and she’s always been a bit of a liar, but only when it comes to the important things.

* * *

 Here are Henry Mills’ mothers. One has to tell her son that he is suddenly back down to two parents, all while not looking at the other, lying prone and asleep (not dead not dead not dead) in the bed her parents share. Because if Emma Swan looks at Regina Mills lying (not dead not dead not dead but almost) asleep in that bed, she might just break apart into all of those tiny pieces that not even her son can put back together again.

* * *

 “Regina, I-“

Henry Mills has lost his father. His mother has been tortured. His other mother has been a mother for one year and one hour out of the eleven years Henry Mills has been alive, and she does not know how to be alone anymore.

But she will. If it means that Henry Mills does not know what it is to be without a mother. He will always have more than a baby blanket to hold. She will, even if that is Henry Mills’ other mother she’s running away from, and the tears on her cheeks are not diamonds that can be ground up into fairy dust. (They’re just tears, but they hurt like a bitch as they fall). Or maybe the hurt is deeper inside and the tears are a physical manifestation of the pai - Anyway. She runs and she cries, and she will be Henry Mills’ mother if it kills her.

* * *

 It might just kill Emma Swan, being Henry Mills’ mother. Because if they throw this fucking diamond into a green, swirly portal, maybe their Kid will go to sleep with two parents tonight.

Or maybe not.

Henry Mills woke up this morning with three parents. Then there were two. And a different two. And maybe one. And there might be two again, but also there might be no one. Regina Mills does not want there to be no one. So, she grits her teeth when her son’s other mother throws her hands up and vibrates with their conjoined power, and tries not to cry out in relief as Emma Swan’s magic mixes with her own.

* * *

 If Henry Mills were here, he would have two mothers. One of whom reaches out a hand for the other to hold whilst boarding a pirate ship. If Henry Mills were here, he would see his mothers kissing on the deck of said ship after everyone else has gone to sleep, because they yelled and fought and held hands and hugged that one time and one’s been tortured and the other had to eat chimera meat once and one’s exhausted – well, they both are really, but neither wants the comfort of sleep – and one’s an idiot and the other was a Queen before she became an Evil Queen before she became a mother, and one is a Savior, and everyone thinks that means there’ll be fairytale happy endings. But life’s not a fairytale, even when it comes from a storybook. And Henry Mills is waiting, dead, for his mothers on an island called Neverland.

Here are Henry Mills’ mothers, kissing.

Henry Mills had, at one time, three parents, and at other times, one, or two.

Henry Mills is dead. Are his mothers mothers anymore?

* * *

 


End file.
